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F2P
Creativerse is an F2P game, which has its pros and cons. This article tries to shed more light on both aspects. Basic information F2P is short for "free to play" and is supposed to mean that a game can be downloaded and played for free. But there is a catch of course. While actually "free" games are either offline games or player-hosted games that do not have to be financed any further after development has finished, the "free" part of "F2P" (also called "freemium" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium ) in reality nearly always only applies to the basic game content of ongoing online games. "Free to play" is one of different revenue models for online video games that pretty much always goes together with more or less optional purchasable content which the game actually relies on to be constantly financed in order to cover all the ongoing costs. Other monetization options for online games would be "box" sales (nowadays mainly downloads) combined with regular purchasable add-ons/DLCs, and/or monthly subscriptions (sometimes "life time subscriptions" as another option), or financing by advertising/offer walls, server leasing, merchandising sales, sponsorship (often together with licenses), rewarded crowd funding, donations, Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/c/games) or virtual currencies that have to be directly paid with real money. Additionally to that, many developers (and/or publishers) offer parts of their online games for free as a "trial", like certain areas of the game world (for example the "newbie land"), or most of the game content up to a certain (low) character level, or playing for a (brief) time span, which is usually all very limited, while the main game content is not for free. Creativerse was not always a free game In August 2015 the developers decided to release the Early Access version of Creativerse as a purchasable game instead of developing the game up to its release state behind closed doors. Playful did this for different reasons. For one thing, it's not so bad to collect money to fund the development for a bit longer before releasing a game. Secondly the developers wanted to include their players into the development process by discussing aspects of the game and future plans on the forums, collecting player suggestions and sometimes also to test concepts before release, like payment options. And paying players usually are more likely to be reasonable people with an understanding of economic enforcements who might be more interested in the game development than players who just fleetingly check out "another free game". In the words of PlayfulDavid: "It actually has more to do with ensuring the quality of feedback we get. Someone who spends $20 to get early access for a game that will eventually be free is clearly invested in what we're trying to do with Creativerse and will likely give us thoughtful, detailed feedback. That's the kind of feedback that truly helps shape the development of the game and lets us be as responsive in the community as we are.". http://steamcommunity.com/app/280790/discussions/0/34095131826850413/#p4 After Creativerse was finally changed to F2P status during the later stage of the Early Access phase on November 11th 2015, Playful launched the "Pro"-DLC on Steam on August 2nd 2016 http://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=creativerse+pro and gave this DLC to all the Early Access players for free, after they had already received a large amount of Coins and the Gold Pack too. Why did Creativerse "go free"? Creativerse was intended to become an F2P game from the very start. Why? The developers have replied to questions about this over and over again. They said that their main intention from the beginning was to reach as many players as possible with their game: "We’re committed to being free to play because it removes the biggest barrier to entry for new players." - PlayfulDavid, Oktober 7th 2014 http://steamcommunity.com/app/280790/discussions/0/613937943129766916/#c613937943169259681 This includes whole families and younger audience that is very likely to be attracted by the colorful game worlds, funny looking creatures and easy-to-get-into gameplay of Creativerse. However, Playful knew from statistics that only a small percentage of free players uses optional pay content. The developers revealed during Early Access that they only expected 5% of their (future) players to buy items and the like for the game. They wanted to avoid making Creativerse into a "slot machine" as the early FAQs put it. On the other hand they knew that the servers and game support would continue to produce constant costs for their online game, and they also planned to improve the game for many years to come... "There's nothing easy about it. F2P is still totally a frontier and games are still experimenting with what works and feels good vs what's greedy and exploitive. What's great for us with Creativerse, thanks to Steam Early Access, is that you guys (our players) will no doubt tell us if/when we screw it up and even tell us how to improve, so we've got an easy way to measure our sucess!" - Paul Bettner, August 13th 2014 http://steamcommunity.com/app/280790/discussions/0/208684375416021674/ Why does F2P have such a bad reputation? Even though the term "free to play" suggests that the game can be downloaded and played for free, online game developers/publishers in reality only provide basic parts of their game for free in hope that useful or tempting additional purchasable game content will be bought by players for money. At least this usually enables players to enjoy a lot more game content for free than a mere "trial" would, often up to all of the available features that the game has to offer, minus "cosmetical" optional purchases. This sometimes leads to "Temple Run" game designs, where games offer nearly all game content for free, but players have to invest a lot of time by playing through many game features repeatedly (or sometimes by waiting for longer periods of time) to unlock this game content, while paying money will unlock it right away. However, several game developers/publishers (mainly of browser games) chose and still choose to "abuse" the F2P/freemium label by limiting the free game content to a very dull minimum, or by slowing down the free gaming progress painfully, and/or by reducing the competitive possibilities (an important factor in PvP centred games) of free players a lot, which more or less forces players to pay at least a certain sum of money (often monthly even) to experience an enjoyable gameplay or to keep up with their fellow players. Pay to Win The often-used term for this pressuring monetization strategy is "Pay to Win" (also "P2W" or "pay 2 win") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play#Criticism . This term mainly refers to games where players will often, if not always, have no chance to win player versus player combat as long as they won't purchase game content like stronger weapons, high tier armor, better ships, spaceships, mechas or other vehicles, additional character skills or unlockable higher levels of combat skills, all kinds of consumables or items that offer boosts or healing effects, defense buildings/structures, equipment for the NPC armies that players control, more land to build on, more supporting NPCs, etc. It should be obvious why it is considered unfair to design games in a way that free players cannot stand up to paying players in combat, and why game developers or publishers are criticized for resorting to such tactics. This does not even apply solely to F2P games, but can also happen in games with a box sales and/or subscription business model that will still sell some game content additionally. Similar strategies can be much less criticized though, like when games that are not centred around PvP still make certain PvP features available only to players who pay money for this. As long as players who are not interested in PvP are not affected by PvPers during their gameplay, or if only very specific PvP features (like entrance to a PvP-free-for-all area or clan-coalition wars in an otherwise PvE-centred game) are concerned, this is usually accepted by the player community. Is Creativerse "Pay to Win"? Since Creativerse is centred around building and PvE-content, as it offers protectable player claims for free, while enabling and disabling the PvP option for whole game worlds is to become a basic option that free players can also use anytime for their worlds, Creativerse can hardly be considered a "Pay to Win" game. Currently the Store also only offers differently looking equipment, but not any "better" weapons or armor types than what players can craft for free ingame. While the strongest weapon in the game - the Lumite Sword deals 100 damage points, all the purchasable weapons are much weaker: the Hidden Temple Sword as well as the Medieval Sword only inflict 70 damage points each, the Industrial Crowbar and the Golden Sword (from the Welcome Bundle/DLC) even only deal 60 damage points each. The glider, flashlight and higher stamina (running for a longer time) do give players who buy the "Pro" DLC a little bit of an advantage over free players in consensual PvP combat though. Item Shop Server hosting, customer support, game (and forum, social media etc.) moderation, licenses and continued development have to be paid to keep an online game running, and game creators need a constant income of money in order to pay their own living expenses as well of course. This is why free to play games very often (but not always) rely on sales via item shops, most often with "microtransaction" options that will cost only little money (but can pile up) and/or with larger offers like bundles. Since online games need money to keep on existing, item shop offers have to be somehow attractive to players, because otherwise nobody would want to pay for them. On the other hand, game developers/publishers risk being called greedy and losing reputation if players feel pushed or forced to buy stuff from their Item Shop. Of course Item Shops can nowadays even be found in games that are not for free initially, but based on "box" sales plus add-ons/DLC - and sometimes such games even sell regular subscriptions additionally to all of that. Item Shops can offer a large variety of game content, not restricted to actual virtual items. However, many games, like Creativerse as well, voluntarily limit their offers to game content to items or other content that does not influence the gaming progress or gameplay - so-called "cosmetic" offers. As for Creativerse, the Store mainly has blocks and objects like furniture to offer with well made textures designed by professional artists that sometimes even feature animated effects like smoke. As for equipment, there are often interesting looking weapons to buy that still inflict much less damage points than the strongest ingame weapon that players can craft for free. Other Store offers of Creativerse include fireworks (animated effects again) or machines like fans or levers that do not exceed the functions than of the machinery that players can craft for free. There are smaller purchasing options (coin packs) as well as larger packs, and the coins can then be spent on cheap block packs with only 3 types of crafting recipes or item packs that only contain a few items, or also on larger bundles with dozens of items and crafting recipes in them. Please note that even free players can receive store-exclusive items from other players as a gift who have bought the recipe packs. Also, in Creativerse players are not bombarded with annoying advertisement for the Store. And since the Store doesn't offer gameplay influencing items nor game content, it is safe to say that Creativerse's Item Shop is nothing more than a pure option to support the game development by spending small sums of money on fancy looking stuff to build with or to wear. Why do Item Shops have a bad reputation? Something that makes people hate Item Shops (aside from worries about being "forced" to pay for game relevant content there) is that these ingame stores nearly always use a virtual ingame currency. This obfuscates how much an item or game content is worth in real money, especially since the ingame currencies often have fluctuating prices, just like the real world currencies also have. On the other hand this can be used to the advantages of observant and patient players too. During "sales" times players need to pay much less for ingame currencies than usual, and since real world currencies also differ a lot on platforms like Steam, some players can save up to 20% of their money if they transfer it across payment services located in other countries. Item Shops also tend to have a bad reputation because of microtransactions. Microtransactions Microtransactions mean that players can purchase virtual items or game content via micropayments. Micropayments are financial online transactions with very small sums of money involved. Microtransactions are the dominant business model for mobile games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction . The number of players spending money for a free game via microtransactions ranges from 0.5% to 6%. The biggest problem with microtransactions might be that it makes people who are bad or inexperienced with money pay a fortune in small doses that they tend to lose track of. Games that are popular among young players tend to earn a lot of money through microtransactions. Several online games have manage to raise their profit dramatically by changing to an F2P business model combined with microtransactsions ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-play ). Which means that even though very few players spend money for F2P games, they still spend very large sums of money in total. In some countries, it is therefore prohibited by law to phrase ingame advertisment in a way that could be interpreted as being addressed to children and asking them to invest money. Playful has repeatedly pointed out that is not their intention to simply get rich by copying a very popular game and bringing it to a very popular platform (which never went well for any of the uncreative copycats that ever tried this in the world of games yet anyways) and especially not to pressure players into paying money. The developers of Creativerse have already changed their original monetization plans a few times whenever the player community gave negative feedback and actually discarded some ideas. For example: the Super Extractor was originally intended to be a store offer, and it was obvious that Playful was thinking of offering store content that would speed up other parts of the gaming progress too. This was badly received by the player community during Early Access, so the developers turned the Super Extractor crafting recipe into an end game goal obtainable from the Thing, they reduced the crafting times of all extractors and crafting stations repeatedly and even removed the crafting table at one point, inventing the crafting menu instead that does not require to wait a few seconds for each crafting process anymore. The Welcome Bundle http://store.steampowered.com/app/638180/Creativerse__Welcome_Bundle/ was also badly received at first because of its collision with the original Gold Pack that was given to Early Access players as a "Thank you" when Creativerse went F2P, so Playful quickly changed the design of the older sword to make a difference. Since all the Early Access players also received other gifts additionally - a significant amount of Coins and the "Pro"-DLC http://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=creativerse+pro for free - the players did not protest very loudly anyways. "Our decision to go F2P is all about removing barriers to entry and not about trying to squeeze more money out of people with sleazy microtransactions. We want as many people to play the game as possible, and it doesn't bother us if most of those people never spend any money on the game. We also want to make the game as fun as possible for all players and not tie any pay to play or pay to win mechanics to transactions." http://steamcommunity.com/app/280790/discussions/0/613937943129766916/#c613937943171475612 Other purchasable game content While the F2P business model of Creativerse is occasionally criticized because of its Item Shop and the general problems that are associated with that, there are other variants of purchasable game content that Playful offers aside from its Store. The "Pro"-DLC http://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=creativerse+pro for example definitely includes gameplay-relevant options, different from the packs and bundles offered via Store; like the possibility to own many more game worlds than just one, to use a Glider and a Flashlight, and to change options of game worlds in a way that will influence the gameplay experience significantly (like easy or hard combat difficulties, passive creatures, prohibiting PvP, etc.), also an very useful extension of the inventory (up to 60 slots) and twice as much stamina for the player character on all worlds. Please note that the "Welcome"-DLC, is also available in the ingame Store as the "Welcome Bundle" - it is the very same offer; a recipe bundle that comes with several stacks of blocks, items and Coins too. Building kits for Blueprints are also not part of the Store, but still purchasable with Coins just as well. These block kits can be bought by clicking the "get kit and build now" option in the "Blueprint" TAB below the chosen official Blueprint created by Playful and contains all blocks and objects required to build the standard building or structure that the according Blueprint suggests; while the Blueprint itself is now for free, but was a purchasable game content during Early Access days. Another thing you can buy for Coins without visiting the Store are player claims. Areas can be claimed by players or free by trading in certain ores, but alternatively Coins can be spent for this too, which saves a lot of time. And while only 6 (+2 for "Pro") claims can be "bought" with Ores, you can buy up to 24 (+2 for "Pro") claims on each single game world when spending Coins for this. So this is a significant temptation for players who play on public worlds and want to be sure that their base is protected well from (potential) griefers. The "Pro"-DLC The "Pro"-DLC contains significant game content for Creativerse that gives "Pro" players a slight advantage over their fellow players and extends the gameplay experience noticably. It has been discussed a lot and has sometimes been misunderstood too, for example when returning Early Access players did not realize that they had already been granted this DLC for free and simply had to activate it in their game library. http://store.steampowered.com/app/515710/Creativerse__Pro/ The "Pro"-DLC provides players with: * a Flashlight as a permanent equipment (not dropped at defeat) to be switched on with a quick-key * a Glider as a permanent equipment too (also not dropped at defeat) to be used with a quick-key * 20 slots more inventory space in the inventory/bag (makes 60 slots in total) * double Stamina (200 instead of 100) * 2 player claims for free on each game world * the possibility to own and moderate up to 12-15 game worlds * the possibility to toggle more optional settings for own game worlds anytime: disabling of world bound recipes (already unlocked common crafting recipes will carry over to this world), "peaceful" (solely defensive) creatures, higher spawn rate of treasure chests, higher spawn rate of tree flowers, wild crops, mushrooms, beeswax and the like, sparse creature spawn, low gravity, hard combat difficulty mode, easy combat difficulty mode, and the option to choose a more "SF"-like skybox on own game worlds * a note "Pro player" over the player character that makes their advantages visible to other players The "Welcome"-DLC The "Welcome" download content is now offered on Steam too since 2017 - 05 - 24 and is exactly the same thing as the Welcome Bundle that can be purchased in the ingame Store via Steam Wallet. So it can only be purchased once - either via Steam or ingame Store. Actually, this Bundle/DLC is not of much help for beginners contrary to the description on Steam, since it just contains 1500 Store Coins for a smaller price than usual and some crafting recipes plus several stacks of already crafted blocks and items as examples for the according crafting recipes. The Golden Sword only deals 70 damage points which is much less than the free Lumite Sword has. Category:Gameplay